The first Thanksgiving history is far more dramatic — and far more complicated — than the cheerful story most of us learned in school. The real 1621 harvest feast at Plymouth was born out of starvation, disease, and an uneasy alliance between English settlers and the Wampanoag people. It lasted three days, involved around 90 Native guests and about 50 English colonists, and the menu almost certainly did not include pumpkin pie. What historians actually know about that autumn comes down to just two short primary-source accounts — and everything else is a mix of reasonable inference and later invention.
In this article, we separate documented fact from legend, trace what really happened in 1621, and follow the surprising 240-year road from a colonial harvest feast to a national holiday proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War. Along the way, we will meet the Pilgrims, the remarkable Wampanoag interpreter Squanto, the magazine editor who campaigned for decades to make Thanksgiving official, and the president who moved the date and accidentally started a national controversy. This is the true story of the first Thanksgiving.
What the First Thanksgiving History Actually Records
Almost everything historians know about the 1621 feast comes from two primary sources. The first is a letter written by Edward Winslow, a Plymouth colonist, dated December 1621 and published in 1622 in a pamphlet called Mourt’s Relation. The second is William Bradford’s journal, Of Plymouth Plantation, written years later. That is it. No menus, no seating charts, no illustrations — just a few paragraphs that later generations turned into a national myth.
Here is what Winslow actually wrote, in essence: after the settlers’ first successful corn harvest in the fall of 1621, Governor William Bradford sent four men out fowling (hunting birds) so the colony could “rejoice together” after gathering in the harvest. The Wampanoag sachem (leader) Massasoit arrived with some 90 of his men — unexpectedly, and far outnumbering the English — and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the feast. The celebration lasted three days, with the English and their guests eating, drinking, and exercising their arms (military drills and games) together. Winslow closes by noting that although the harvest was small, “by the goodness of God, we are so far from want” that they often wished they could share their plenty with friends in England.
Bradford’s journal adds that the colony’s harvest that year included corn, and that in the fall there was a “great store of wild turkeys” along with venison, waterfowl, and fish. Reading the two accounts together, historians reconstruct a harvest celebration in the autumn of 1621 — most likely sometime between late September and early November — attended by roughly 53 surviving English settlers and about 90 Wampanoag men. Note that only men are mentioned on both sides; there is no record of Wampanoag women or children attending, and the four surviving English women of the colony presumably did the enormous work of preparing food for around 140 people over three days.
The Mayflower, Plymouth, and the Harsh First Winter
To understand why that harvest feast mattered so much, you have to understand what came before it. The settlers we call Pilgrims — mostly English Separatists seeking religious freedom, plus other colonists — crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620. They sighted land in November 1620, far north of their intended destination in Virginia, and eventually settled at a place they named Plymouth, on the site of a former Wampanoag village called Patuxet that had been emptied by disease a few years earlier.
The first winter was catastrophic. Of the 102 passengers who arrived, roughly half died of disease, exposure, and malnutrition before spring — a staggering loss that included most of the colony’s women. The survivors lived aboard the Mayflower through the winter, finally moving ashore in the spring of 1621. When Winslow wrote about rejoicing after the harvest, he was writing as one of the lucky ones: the feast was a celebration of survival as much as of abundance.
The colony’s prospects changed with the arrival of spring and two extraordinary Wampanoag figures. In March 1621, a man named Samoset walked into the settlement speaking broken English he had learned from fishermen. Days later he returned with Tisquantum — known to history as Squanto — a Patuxet man who spoke fluent English. The story of early English colonization has other remarkable chapters too, from the vanished settlers of America’s lost colonies to the daring missions of the Navajo Code Talkers centuries later.
Squanto, Massasoit, and the Wampanoag
Squanto’s story is one of the most remarkable in early American history — and it is fully documented. He had been kidnapped by English explorers years earlier, taken to Spain and then England, and had made his way back to his homeland, only to find his entire village dead from disease. He became the Pilgrims’ indispensable interpreter and guide: he taught them how to plant corn using fish as fertilizer, where to fish, and how to navigate relations with the surrounding Native nations.
Massasoit, the sachem of the Wampanoag, had his own reasons for allying with the newcomers. His people had been devastated by the same epidemics, and he faced threats from rival groups such as the Narragansett. In the spring of 1621, he negotiated a treaty of mutual aid and nonaggression with the Plymouth colonists — a peace that, remarkably, held for more than 50 years, until it collapsed in the bloody King Philip’s War of 1675–76. When Massasoit showed up at the 1621 feast with 90 men, he was honoring — and displaying the strength behind — that alliance.
Honest history requires saying this plainly: the feast was a genuine moment of cooperation, but it was not the beginning of lasting harmony. Within a generation, English expansion would bring conflict, land loss, and devastating war to the Wampanoag and other New England Native peoples. The Wampanoag perspective on Thanksgiving is profoundly different from the traditional American telling — since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at Plymouth each Thanksgiving for a National Day of Mourning, honoring Native ancestors and the struggles Native people continue to face. Both stories are true, and both deserve to be told.
What Was on the Table: Menu Facts vs Myths
So what did they actually eat? The documented facts are thinner than the legends, but historians can reconstruct a likely menu from the sources and from what was available in coastal New England in the fall:
- DOCUMENTED: Venison. Winslow explicitly says the Wampanoag brought five deer.
- DOCUMENTED: Wildfowl. Bradford mentions the abundance of wild turkeys, and Winslow’s fowlers were sent out hunting birds. Ducks and geese were also plentiful.
- LIKELY: Corn in various forms — it was the harvest being celebrated, and cornmeal porridge or bread was a staple. Fish, eels, and shellfish such as mussels and lobster (abundant and easy to gather).
- LEGEND (probably not served): Mashed potatoes and sweet potato casserole — potatoes were not yet grown in New England. Pumpkin pie — the colonists had pumpkins, but no butter, flour, or ovens for pie crusts, and little sugar. Cranberry sauce as we know it — cranberries grew wild, but without much sugar they would have been far too tart to serve as a sauce.
- LEGEND: A big roast turkey as the centerpiece. Wild turkeys were present, but there is no evidence turkey was the star of the table. The birds may well have been ducks, geese, or even passenger pigeons.
They ate with knives, spoons, and fingers — forks were not yet in common use in England, let alone in a struggling colony. They drank beer and possibly wine; water was often unsafe. And the cooking was done over open fires by a handful of exhausted women feeding 140 people for three days — a detail the storybooks usually leave out.
First Thanksgiving History: Myths Everyone Believes
Over the centuries, the simple 1621 feast accumulated layers of invention. Here is a clear-eyed legend-versus-fact check on the most common claims:
- LEGEND: The Pilgrims wore black clothes and buckled hats and shoes. FACT: There is no evidence for the buckles, and the settlers wore practical clothing in earth tones — browns, greens, russets. The black-and-buckle image comes from much later Victorian illustrations.
- LEGEND: The feast was called “Thanksgiving” by the participants. FACT: Neither Winslow nor Bradford uses the word “Thanksgiving” for the 1621 event. To the Pilgrims, a “thanksgiving” meant a solemn day of prayer and fasting, not a feast. Days of thanksgiving were proclaimed separately — including one in 1623 after rain ended a drought.
- LEGEND: Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be America’s national bird instead of the bald eagle. FACT: In a 1784 letter to his daughter, Franklin praised the turkey as a “bird of courage” and criticized the bald eagle’s character — but he never formally proposed the turkey as a national symbol. It was a private opinion, not a campaign.
- LEGEND: The Pilgrims invited the Wampanoag out of pure friendship. FACT: The alliance was strategic on both sides. Massasoit sought English guns and support against rivals; the colonists desperately needed Native knowledge and protection. The feast was real, but so was the realpolitik.
- LEGEND: Thanksgiving has been celebrated continuously since 1621. FACT: The 1621 feast was not repeated annually, and the holiday Americans celebrate today was created much later — as the next section explains.
How the First Thanksgiving Became a National Holiday
If the first Thanksgiving history ended in 1621, there would be no holiday at all. Days of thanksgiving were proclaimed sporadically in colonial New England, and the Continental Congress issued thanksgiving proclamations during the Revolution, but nothing stuck nationally. The first president to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving was George Washington, who in 1789 designated Thursday, November 26, as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer. It was a one-time proclamation, not an annual institution — and Thomas Jefferson, who believed such proclamations mixed church and state, refused to issue any during his presidency.
The person most responsible for the modern holiday was not a president but a magazine editor: Sarah Josepha Hale, the influential editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Beginning in the 1840s, Hale campaigned relentlessly for a national Thanksgiving Day, writing editorials and personal letters to a string of presidents. Presidents Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan all declined. Then came the Civil War — and Abraham Lincoln.
On October 3, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday to be observed on the last Thursday of November. His proclamation called on Americans to give thanks — even “in the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity” — for the country’s blessings, and to pray for healing. It was a deliberate act of national unity: a shared ritual for a country tearing itself apart. Every president after Lincoln continued the tradition, and the last-Thursday date held for over 70 years. For more true turning points in American history, read our account of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Then came the strangest chapter in the holiday’s history. In 1939, with the country still climbing out of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a week — to the third Thursday of November — to give retailers a longer Christmas shopping season. The country split: some states celebrated on the new date (“Franksgiving,” critics called it), others on the old one, and some on both. After two years of calendar chaos, Congress stepped in and, in late 1941, fixed Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of November — the date Americans have celebrated ever since.
Remembering the Whole Story
The first Thanksgiving history, told honestly, holds two truths at once. The 1621 feast really happened: English settlers and Wampanoag people really did eat together for three days, and the alliance that made it possible kept the peace for half a century — an extraordinary achievement in the history of early America. Squanto, Massasoit, Bradford, and Winslow were real people navigating a genuinely dangerous world, and their cooperation deserves to be remembered.
And the fuller story also includes what followed: the epidemics that had already hollowed out Native communities before the Mayflower arrived, the land pressures and wars that followed, and the generations of Native Americans for whom Thanksgiving week is a time of mourning as well as gratitude. Teaching the documented facts — the deer, the fowlers, the three days, the two short letters that are our only window into it — does not diminish the holiday. It deepens it, turning a cartoon into something real: a harvest meal shared by survivors, in a fragile peace, on the edge of a continent neither side fully understood.
This Thanksgiving, when the turkey (or the tofurkey) hits the table, share one true story from 1621 with the people you love — and tell us in the comments which myth surprised you most. If you found this first Thanksgiving history eye-opening, explore more real American stories on ENG Post, from the lost colonies to the heroes of the Navajo Code Talkers.